Sunday, November 16, 2014

War

Jimmy Carter, The Nobel Peace Prize Lecture

This is how I think too. I have thought this way since the sixties. In high school I thought differently and went to West Point after, but I changed. I am stained by the wars my country has fought through my life and through my family before my life too. A war may not be necessary no matter how many politicians try to say it is. And war is always an evil no matter how many politicians and generals say it is not.

However I am skeptical rather than a pacifist. I would fight an invader, for example. Sometimes one must marry what is evil on this planet, accept the stain of it and move on.

But just because I have to engage does not absolve me from evil. Knowing that clarifies things.

1 comment:

I live in a landWhere we see no evilHand to eyesIt is no suprise What has happnedI live in a landWhere we speak no evilHand to mouthThere is no doubt About itI live in a land Where we hear no evilHand to earNo way to hearWhat might be happeningI live in a land where it may be trueAll those things will be missconstruedIn the cause of the greater good

The View From The Northern Wall

Some years ago my poetry took on a mythic flavor and I became a character in my own poems, a mage, "the man of the Northern Wall". This apellation is not completely fictional. My middle name is Noordwal, a Dutch term for north wall, though in current Dutch it mainly means north bank as in riverbank. I was told that an ancestor, a Portugese Jew escaping the Inquisition, settled in a small Dutch town and took this name from where he settled, near the north wall of the town. I have thought for a long time that -wal meant wall, think my mother told me that. A linguist might say that my usage is no longer common, is an older usage, but then the Inquisition happened in Portugal a few centuries ago, right around the time the Moors lost control of the Iberian Peninsula and the Jews lost the modest protection given them by Islam. Now I write as this mage, my poetry persona.